One met her gaze. He was wrapped in a horse blanket; only his eyes were visible. There was no human understanding in that look; it was the unblinking stare of a lizard. She knew he counted her feeding him not kindness but prudence: She wanted a good report made of her when she was at his people’s mercy.
She then rode before the assembled warriors and dismounted beside Grunig, who had begun the ritual of consecrating the host. After Grunig thrust a ritual spear into a cauldron of horse’s blood, then raised it up to Wodan and traced the sign for victory in the air, Auriane tore open the leather pouch containing the ashes of the white cow and cat she had sacrificed in autumn. Calling on Fria, she cast them onto the air and let the wind disperse them over the armed multitude.
Sigwulf shouted from the palisade, “A horseman comes!”
Auriane mounted the walk. A single cavalryman had broken away from the legion. As he galloped closer, they recognized Siggo, a distant kinsman of Sigwulf’s, captured in a raid four summers ago. Siggo was now part of the auxiliary cavalry of the Eighth Augusta.
Siggo was greeted sulkily by the warriors on the wall as he pulled his horse to a halt below them. She heard Sigwulf mutter loudly about a “strutting cock who traded honor for a richly caparisoned horse.”
Siggo wore a helmet of gold with a long yellow plume and a beautifully worked breastplate buckled over a leather jerkin embroidered with scarlet. His horse was resplendent in parade trappings; saddlecloth and bridle glinted with bronze medallions and pendants of brilliantly colored enamel. His mount’s head was fitted with a bronze parade frontlet with intricate eyepieces. All stared in fascination, for the horse’s armor made the beast appear as much a warrior as its rider.
Siggo removed his helmet, revealing bright yellow-blond hair cropped short and combed forward in the Roman fashion. But the warriors on the wall noticed foremost how healthy and well-fed he was.
“I would speak to the daughter of Baldemar,” Siggo shouted out importantly. Auriane called down in a strong, clear voice, “I am here, Siggo.”
And now Siggo stared, obviously appalled by the condition of his fellow tribespeople—they looked like wild men who never knew the shelter of roof or hearth. Their sullen, threatening mood unnerved him—he had agreed to this meeting only because he was promised a promotion to officer’s rank—and because he believed he would be protected by the power of the kinship bond. But now he was not so certain. Starvation and fear had worn away at the constraints of ancient law and made unholy madmen of them. He wondered if his own brothers would avenge him if these men on the wall struck him down.
“Auriane,” Siggo began, fighting the impulse to wheel his horse about and flee. “It is no use. You must open the gate to them. They found your child.”
Auriane gave a low cry heard only by those near. But she kept her head proudly raised, revealing nothing of her agony to the man below.
“Avenahar, that is her name, is it not?” Siggo continued. “A black-haired girl aged just over a year?”
The very air scalded her skin. She felt she had been run through by a sword still glowing from the forge.
“The babe will be spared if you release the Roman hostages now, and throw open the gate. If you make them force their way in, they will show no mercy to you. Open the gates and the babe will live.”
“Liar!” dozens of tribesmen shouted at once.
“Look how pretty Siggo is with his sassy plumes,” Sigwulf taunted.
Another shouted, “Go back to your hot baths, Roman slave.”
“Wine-swilling dog of a dog,” Coniaric cried. “Roll over for us the way you do for them!”
“Siggo eats lying down.”
“And loves standing up!”
“—with tender, half-grown boys in the baths!”
“Silence!” Auriane cried, her voice piercing the din. She wondered if Siggo saw how she trembled. Fastila grasped her arm.
“It could be a lie,” Fastila said in a fevered whisper, trying to will Auriane strength with her eyes, her voice. “Who would dare seize a child in Ramis’ keeping?”
“And it could be true,” Auriane replied. “Our last Veleda was captured alive by them and taken to Rome.” She closed her eyes. “True or no,” she whispered, “there is only one answer to give.”
Once again the gods leave me no choice. Ramis, can they have wrest the child from you? Or perhaps you gave Avenahar up for some dark, obscure purpose of your own? Avenahar! If this be no trick, my next words condemn you to death.
Siggo could not see that within, her heart had collapsed; he saw only a gaze so brilliant with scorn he felt he might be scorched, and an intimidating mane of hair flared menacingly by a sudden wind.
“Go from us, Siggo,” Auriane replied in a low voice. “It shall not be. Do you think I will bargain for the life of only my child when children of every hearth have been murdered by you or taken into slavery? Do you think I would betray all these valorous ones by opening the gates? You’ve lived with them too long, Siggo—their ways have poisoned your blood. Leave us.”
Now I should rip out my tongue. I am populating the heavens with loved ones whose deaths I have caused.
Auriane’s words brought a fresh cacophony of approving shouts from the warriors on the wall.
“We’ll use your guts for harp strings, spawn of a troll!”
“Heap of dung from a niding’s pig!”
“Lice-ridden dog of a guest-murderer!”
Siggo’s courage broke. Without bothering to replace his helmet, he yanked his horse about and urged it to a gallop.
One of the warriors on the wall—Auriane never knew who—hurled a spear.
“Do not!” she shouted. “He is an envoy!”
But it was too late. The weapon was well aimed; it struck Siggo in the back of the neck, penetrating through. Siggo toppled from the horse, writhed fitfully for a time, then lay motionless.
The envoy was slain before the legions’ eyes.
The riderless horse cantered back toward the Roman lines. All along the palisade a great cheer was raised.
Auriane hurled a spear with all her strength, aiming at the distant legion. “Murderers!” she cried out in a savage voice she did not recognize as her own. The wind caught her spear and carried it, extending its flight to an impossible length. But still it landed far short of its mark. Dimly she was aware the flight of that spear was not unlike the course of her life—always she struggled mightily, and it was never enough.
A horn tone rose up, intense as a high wind, dark and beautiful, liquid and sustained, forbidding as the shadow of a raptor gliding over the land; it claimed the wild countryside as its own, announcing that World’s End had come. Auriane knew it as the call of the cornu, the great, curved Roman war horn, ordering the attack.
She saw multiple swift-and-ominous shifting movements amidst the dark rectangle of men. Then the first cohorts of the legion began to move.
The bowmen on the wall locked themselves into place, readied their weapons and strove to think only of the clouds high above.
Steadily, the legion advanced, while time stretched on cruelly; Auriane felt the tramp of a thousand booted feet stamping into damp, yielding earth.
When at last the rank was within arrow-shot, she dropped her arm.
The fire arrows flew. Most thudded harmlessly against heavy rectangular shields.
The men of the legion halted at this distance, and there was an unfathomable pause during which the warriors on the wall saw more mysterious and purposeful movement, carried out with mechanical precision. Something unwieldy was being swiftly unloaded from the army’s wagons.
Then a structure resembling a great shed on wheels was slowly dragged into view. Constructed of screens sheeted with iron plates, the whole was two horse-lengths long and a horse-length wide. Another came behind it, and another. It was soon apparent they meant to form a corridor with them so they could approach the wall in safety.
“Mantlets,” Auriane said in a low voice to Sigwu
lf. Decius had described them to her. “Under their protection they’ll most likely bring up scaling ladders.”
“Wheyfaced cowards,” Sigwulf spat, his weathered, pockmarked face contracted into a troll-scowl. “And where is their God-Emperor Domitian? Why is he not charging at their head? They have a battle chief who does not lead.”
Moments later the bowmen let fly a barrage of arrows at the slowly approaching mantlets, but they clattered off the iron sheeting and dotted the field with shivering tongues of flame.
Auriane shouted at them to cease. Some new and sinister activity at the wings of the Roman formation caught her attention. She felt her body tense, though she saw nothing, for all were momentarily blinded by the rising sun—a disadvantage she was certain the enemy had taken into account.
“What is it?” Sigwulf asked, frowning, expecting her to know because of her long association with Decius.
There was no time to reply. With a certainty that was part instinct, part rapid deduction, she cried out, “Down!”
Most dropped to the floor of the sentry walk in time.
Above them was the rushing sound of air being torn by heavy missiles. Twenty-one men were violently thrown back onto the hard ground ten feet below.
The Romans had been setting up catapults, fifty, perhaps sixty of them. The women stationed in the rear of the assembled warriors raised a cry, dropped their staves and stones and sprinted forward to see if their own husbands were among the fallen. Five found their men dead or dying and collapsed onto their bodies, wailing and tearing at their hair. One took up her husband’s sword and plunged it into her breast.
Auriane had no choice but to order a party of men to drag them off; this tragedy played out in full view of the army was a sight too demoralizing to be borne. Later she would feel sorrow for them; now she felt herself a being composed solely of iron and fire.
The men on the wall did not dare rise; volley after volley of bolts ripped and slashed the air just above their heads.
“Wodan, preserve your good servants,” she heard one man pray repeatedly in a quavering voice. Auriane felt doom swiftly gaining ground. A part of her accepted it without struggle. What was left of life?
After a moment of paying close attention, she began to recognize an erratic rhythm in the volleys. In an instant she judged to be safe, she stood up quickly, tried to assess what the Romans were doing, and dropped back to her hands and knees.
Fastila and Sigwulf were alarmed by the look in Auriane’s face. “Auriane, what is it?” Fastila whispered.
“They are bringing up a small tower,” she replied, “and it’s filled with soldiers. They think they’ve cleared the wall—now they mean to occupy it. The tower will drop a plank and they’ll rush out in force.”
“We’ll have to set it afire,” Sigwulf said. Auriane did not think that would succeed; it seemed to be covered with hides, and doubtless they were water-soaked. The men inside were well protected; until the tower put down its plank, the soldiers within would not be exposed to weapons fire.
Sigwulf signaled to the archers.
“Aim high,” he ordered. Auriane was glad of his calm; he seemed immovable as a ring-stone. His bristling black beard and wild, tangled hair were near white with fine dust and dirt. She had always seen him as a problem to be gotten round, but in that moment she felt a powerful surge of affection for him.
He withstands this better than anyone, she thought; his habitual lack of reflection on this day serves him well. To be a creature that lives only to act, without wondering why or worrying over what will come of it!
The bowmen set their arrows alight, sprang up, and fired. Seven or eight hit their mark; they landed high on the cumbersome tower’s sides. The bowmen fired twice more. Soon it bristled with flaming arrows, but the flames would not spread. The tower, primitive and terrifying, continued its ponderous, swaying progress.
Sigwulf said grimly, “It is made of some material that does not bum.”
The catapults responded to the assault on the tower with an angry barrage, and it seemed to Auriane their firing was purposefully more irregular now, so that it was impossible to find a safe moment to stand and aim a weapon.
“Retire to the main body,” Auriane said to the archers, trying to make the words sound like a command rather than an admission of defeat. “We’ll have to destroy them as they try to mount the wall.”
Sigwulf leapt to the ground and shouted for the wedge formation, in which every warrior knew his place. Auriane walked through the ranks, comforting as best she could those who seemed near to panic, explaining carefully what was happening, cautioning them against the dangers of bunching too closely together once the battle began. Then she took her place at the front of the wedge, with Witgern and Sigwulf; Fastila was just behind her. She felt they formed a last brave island of humanity, ready to be pulled down into a cold, green-black bottomless sea.
Now they could just see the tower’s pitched hide-covered roof above the wall as it lurched with irregularities in the terrain, approaching with patient, bestial determination.
The sun grew hot as they waited. She listened to the sounds that were near so she would not hear the sounds just beyond the wall: the whine of flies, the whispers of the bolts overhead, the rising and falling notes of the women’s wails, the weak but insistent cry of a child, the rough guttural prayers men muttered over their weapons. Everywhere was the reek of old sweat and the smell of sickness. From somewhere behind her a man dropped to the ground, prey to the illness that came with constant hunger. She heard rapid scuffling as his kinsmen removed him to relative safety.
But in spite of herself she heard the scraping sounds beyond the wall as scaling ladders were placed against them, and the creak of wheels.
The beast is so close we feel its dank breath.
CHAPTER XXIX
AURIANE FELT WITGERN’S GAZE ON HER and turned to him. In his look was the sorrow of a hundred last embraces. We married after all, did we not? she imagined he thought. Our house was the war camp. We cast our lot together, we fought together, and do we not love? Close kinsmen, wife and husband, could not love more.
She gave him a bare smile, meant as acknowledgment of this lifetime bond. Yes, Witgern, Auriane replied with her eyes. In this world where things and people never properly fit, I suppose this honest understanding between us is the richest bond I will ever know. I understand nothing, and already it is time to die. I do not even hate the enemy—it is all too overwhelming for hatred.
Fastila saw the look they exchanged, and Auriane felt her jealousy as heat from a hearthfire. Auriane at once felt regret and pity for her.
Is there no help for us? Auriane wondered. She would have him, he would have me, while I would have no one. And today it all ends with our souls half full, our courses half run—the prize goes to others.
The tower’s bridge crashed resoundingly onto the wall. Before it could disgorge all its men Sigwulf and Auriane burst forward, spears aloft, their Companions close behind.
The sky was dark with spears arcing gracefully into the air. Some must have met their mark—from behind the wall she heard torn-off screams of agony and the thud of falling bodies.
The catapults’ fire ceased, for the legionaries were now in their path. The sudden silence was as horrible as their whistling noise had been. The Chattian band clambered up the ladders and onto the palisade walk. Auriane and Sigwulf dropped their spears and charged the tower bridge with swords drawn, followed by as many warriors as could find a place on it. The impetus of the charge drove the Romans back to the opening of the tower, and for long moments the Chattians held them at bay; the soldiers got no farther than the center of their bridge.
Auriane felt a hope-drunken madness seize her then. Though Sigwulf battled next to her and she felt the press of their warriors at her back, she fought alone, taking one opponent at a time, seeking the exposed throat, the unguarded moment, feeling her sword flash out with its own intelligence. Each time it pierced flesh and bon
e and a soldier toppled to the turf far below, the familiar dark pulse of ecstasy came. She felt herself all ether and fire, boundless and tireless, the one life set between her people and death.
But this rapture was all too brief.
Gradually she realized she had less and less room to maneuver. Too many warriors had crowded onto the bridge. Auriane watched, horrified, as three of their own were pushed off, to be casually gutted by the soldiers below. Auriane and Sigwulf together screamed at the men behind to back up and give them room—but everyone was shouting and no one heeded or heard. Soon the Chattians were hopelessly in each other’s way. Some were struck down by the spears of their overeager fellows behind them.
The Romans, by contrast, continued to advance slowly, methodically, four abreast with shields locked. Relentlessly they came, gradually pushing their way beyond the bridge’s center. Auriane felt herself being dragged back as though she were caught in the suction of a spent wave.
Elsewhere along the wall, all was going badly. Witgern worked frantically alongside all who could find a place, struggling to push scaling ladders off the wall. Once he managed to tip a bucket of boiling pitch onto a line of legionaries ascending a ladder; as the pitch splashed down and got beneath the soldiers’ armor, their screams rose above all other battle sounds. But more ladders were brought by the dozens; soon the warriors on the palisade walk were overwhelmed.
And then all became smoking chaos; no one could have known what happened in every part of the field. But Auriane saw well enough that the Romans controlled the bridge. From there they spilled out onto the sentry walk. Within moments the warriors packed about her were pushed or forced to leap down into the yard.
Before Auriane leapt down, she briefly saw what passed elsewhere.
And she knew they were done.
The fort was a ship with a dozen leaks in its hull, ready to rapidly go down. Scaling ladders had been set in countless places. Soldiers streaked up them with an agility and orderliness born of long training, then fanned out along the palisade walk, where they hurled javelins into the disorder below. Enough legionaries had broken in to overwhelm the tribesmen defending the gate; slowly, from the inside, the Romans were pulling it open.
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